What's New in Rust's "Devblog 184 - Post Mortem" Update
Facepunch's frank follow-up to Devblog 184: a corrupted build broke the Powerplant monument and messed up world files on some servers, eight official servers took damage, and the team owned up to last-minute additions squeezing out testing time.
A day after Devblog 184 shipped in early November 2017, Facepunch published a rare post-mortem explaining why some servers had a rough update day. This wasn't a content patch — it was an honest accounting of a corrupted build, broken monuments, mismatched world files, and what the team planned to do about it.
What Actually Went Wrong
The final build made before the update got corrupted on the build server, which broke the Powerplant monument. Facepunch caught it and kicked off a hotfix build, but any server that had already generated a map with the broken Powerplant ended up with a messed-up world file. After weighing the options, the team decided not to force a wipe, since only a minority of servers were affected. The hotfix was made mandatory for all servers, and owners of corrupted maps were left to decide for themselves whether a wipe was worth it.
Damage on Official Servers
The official servers updated right after the hotfix went out, and eight official servers were left showing corrupt worlds from the broken build. Facepunch worked on removing the floating and underground objects the corruption caused, but chose not to wipe the affected servers because the problem was limited to only a couple of areas per map.
Lessons Learned
To their credit, the team didn't hide behind the build-server failure. They noted that similar mishaps had grown less frequent over the years thanks to more QA staff and an expanded pre-update testing procedure, but admitted the real cause was adding too many things at the last minute, which squeezed the time available to test before going live. The stated commitment: do better at preventing exactly this in the future.
Linux Server Crash
Separately, the recent EAC changes from the main patch introduced a crash affecting Linux servers. A dedicated hotfix just for Linux server owners was promised for later that same day.
Short and unglamorous, but post-mortems like this one were part of what kept the community's trust through Rust's messier update weeks — a straightforward "here's what broke, here's why, here's the fix" with no spin.